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According to four people familiar with the matter, the Trump administration plans to retain only hundreds of employees from thousands of U.S. international development agencies.
According to the people, the plan was introduced to agency leaders on Thursday after notifying staff this week that they would order home from overseas posts within 30 days.
The layoffs are the latest blow to institutions targeted by Presidents Donald Trump and Elon Musk, whose mission is to eliminate wasteful spending from the government.
The United States spends about $40 billion on foreign aid every year, accounting for less than 1% of the federal budget. These programs have long enjoyed bipartisan support, including from Secretary of State Marco Rubio when he was in the Senate. He was appointed as the agent administrator for the agency.
“Foreign aid is the least welcome thing the government spends money,” Rubio told embassy staff in Guatemala on Wednesday, according to some of the transcripts viewed by the Financial Times. “I spent a lot of time in my career. Defend it and explain it, but the whole situation is getting harder.”
Musk and his government efficiency department are particularly interested in the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) seeking to spend on government departments.
“The goal of our efforts has been to identify effective plans and continue them, and to identify inconsistent with our national interests and to identify those plans and to identify them and to identify them,” Rubio said in the Dominican Republic on Thursday.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) employs approximately 10,000 people, including 5,000 “directly hiring” or civil servants. Among them, less than 300 will remain, mainly focusing on humanitarian assistance and global health.
People familiar with the matter say the fate of 5,000 local employees is still unclear. USAID has canceled thousands of contractor positions.
More than 1,400 USAID employees often serve with their families. The State Council will arrange and pay within 30 days. Those who do not agree to leave within 30 days may not pay travel fees, according to the latest guidance from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The State Council will consider exceptions.
A senior official described the Trump administration’s crimes against the agency as “stunning and irresponsible.” In internal information to the Middle East team, the official described the security risks of employees, families, U.S. government property and life-saving programs as “unacceptable heights.”
U.S. Agency for International Development and companies that implement foreign aid programs have been in chaos since Rubio ordered a freeze of foreign aid two weeks ago. An advocacy group that tracked the stop-work order said 10,275 U.S. jobs in contract companies were lost.
Rubio said all foreign aid must make the United States safer and more prosperous. But current and former officials say Rubio is unlikely to achieve that.
Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior USAID official and currently president of Inside International International, said that USD is laying off all employees involved in terrorist programs and contractor.
He wrote on X: “It seems to make Secretary Rubio’s ‘this makes the United States safer’ standard.”
U.S. Agency for International Development officials say the hasty decision to evacuate the agency will have disastrous consequences.
“This is Trump’s Afghanistan,” the official said. “It will be worse than Afghanistan because not only we have no notifications, but Elon Musk has tweeted on Twitter, USAID is a group of criminals, which further integrates into the narrative of many governments in many places where we work.”
